This was more sensible a decade ago; nowadays with so much of our lives online (banking, shopping, correspondance) it's no longer "reasonable" to not do anything "personal" on the internet while you're at work.

I very much agree with you. The entire *reason* that those companies have so many divisions is that they want goodwill you feel towards one of their products (say, the Discman of old) to transfer over to other lines of products (say, their headphones).

However, what this means is that when one division (or, in this case, several) radically screw the pooch, a lot of people associate the negative experience with the company as a whole. Ergo, due to the CD / DRM issue almost a decade ago, I won't buy a Playstation, a VAIO, or a $20 pair of headphones that say Sony on them.

It's not just *GOOD* feelings that transfer over, Sony.

Yeah, not trying to be offensive here, but answering the questions you've posed has spun up an entire industry; it's decidedly non-trivial. On the plus side, for a project of this size you can quite easily get a number of consultancies in Chicago to quote you free of charge.

Assume a DC-wide power outage. You power things back on.

If you can't come back up without the controller (which is on a VM) you fail.

Now, I'm not a VMware guy, so you'll have to tell me-- what does this failure case look like?

Or tor. Or VPN endpoints overseas. Or ssh tunnels.

I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

Sure, but that's still far closer than it should be to becoming law.

I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?

No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.

Replying to do erroneous moderation (was aiming for insightful, whacked redundant instead).

The difference between "illegal" and "right and wrong" are two very different things; the further they diverge in a given society, the more dysfunctional that society appears to the broad brush of history.

True, but...

wait for it...

ICANN has more domains.

That's a bit misleading; every time this has been brought to light it's been the case of the general public bribing a cell company employee. It's a problem, to be sure, but it's also not like I can punch my credit card info into verizonrecords.com or whatnot...

I went to Disneyland last week, will be going again tomorrow; they've never had a fingerprint scanner that I'm aware of...

There's something to be said for sticking to your list price; if everyone charges the same thing for a widget, then you're competing on a more level playing field rather than the race to the bottom we're seeing now.

It's a bit disingenuous to go from talking about video card economics to large televisions; I'd probably never buy either the former locally or the latter online.

You are when you calculate the frequency of needing to return a product sourced online. Once in a while a product has to go back, but it's far from common.